Strength

So I read the "Strengths Based Leadership" book. Actually there are about 100 pages of explanation followed by a breakdown of the the 34 themes and the four domains they fall into. The book also includes a code that lets you take a strengths assessment.

My top 5 strengths are Ideation, Learner, Strategic, Futuristic, and Intellection. I won't even try to explain them since even the spellchecker goes nuts on two of them. They all fall in the Strategic Thinking domain. I got nothing in the Executing, Influencing, or Relation Building domains which was a bit of a disappointment for me.

Hoping the assessment was screwed up I took the results home to my wife to look over. She says the descriptions fit. Oh well.

Looking back on it I guess it does make some sense. I desperately need to get a few executors around me. People that get things done. The assessment says I also need people who can woo people (influencers) and a lot of relationship builders. I have the last two around me but I need executors.

The last time our benevolence association met I presented an idea that would grow us into something that I think would go along way to addressing needs in our community and getting a lot of people using their gifts. I like the idea but I fear there won't be anyone who will step in and make it happen. Now I know why I think that way, because I'm not an executor.

A few years ago I served on an executive team. I ticked off one of the leaders because I suggested an alternative view on something he was pushing. I felt pretty frustrated at the time and dropped off when the next round of elections came up. Now it makes sense because the only thing I was bringing to the table was strategic thinking and that's not what they were looking for. I think they were looking for more influencers and relationship builders who could take what they were selling and promote it among the constituency.

So I guess it makes sense but I don't know where it leaves me. I'm not sure it fits very well with my situation. I think it would have been helpful if I had a few strengths in another domain or two. My first thought was to work on improving in some of the other areas but that goes completely against the premise of the book. Don't waste time on your weaknesses, develop and use your strengths.

Missio 3

Time for my third post on the Missional Leadership Initiative. Let me make a disclaimer that none of what I have quoted here can be taken as 100% accurate. I may have misheard, miss-wrote, taken out of context, misinterpreted, extrapolated, or done any number of misdeeds to what was actually said.

This won't be my notes from our last meeting but I do want to write down a few of the highlights, or at least things that were especially helpful for me.


Reggie talked a lot about moving from one thing to another. He's hooked on it and most of our time together was spent talking about these major shifts. But he threw in a couple of smaller ones that I liked.

"Move from church as a noun to church as a verb." Okay, so that is obvious but then he constructed the sentence, "I church at work," and that kind of rattled around the brain a bit differently. We church, we don't go to church.

"The church doesn't have a mission, the mission has a church." I haven't thought that one through too much yet. It was about not bending God's heart to us, but our heart to God.

Reggie also talked about the siloing we do in our lives. We tend to have a politics silo, academic silo, health silo, church silo, etc. He drew this as vertical columns to represent how we often think this way. Pastors can especially silo their church world. He then erased the church silo and redrew it horizontally, cutting across all the other silos. Again, not exactly a new concept but a refreshing way to look at it for me.

"You don't motivate, you create an environment where people can follow their call." You probably have to do some motivating but we probably spend way too much time on it and neglect creating the environment altogether.


Reggie also threw in some good nuggets on timely topics.

On assessing - "Maturation, not participation. Participation does not mean maturation."

Debriefing - Reggie was big on this. We need to create a culture where our people are debriefed. (And yes, we've heard all the underwear jokes.) It helps us process what we experience and grow through them. We even need to give people an opportunity to debrief after our sermons. "What is the take away?" Learn from Larry King, Oprah, military, first responders.

Programs - So Reggie talks a lot about being people driven versus program driven. The program driven church has even become an archetype. Yet even if we aren't program driven we still have programs. Reggie said, "Think of programs as intentional processes." That's helpful for me. Keeps it from being the goal.

Leadership Development - "We train for tasks instead of movement leadership." I see a lot of potential for thought here. After we train people for all these tasks we promote them to leader. But he says they require different competencies. (Apostolic, entrepreneurial, developers.)

Game Changer - Going missional is a game changer. Therefore it is not incremental. "It's like working on your golf swing to perfect your tennis stroke." This is frightening.


Then there were just a few quotes that I thought were good.

"When did Jesus last change your mind?" I don't have anything to say about this but I love the question. Not sure I like the answer.

"No drive-byes." Every church should have this posted in their board room.

"People don't grow in artificial environments." He was talking about the need to be life-centric.

"You cannot have a missional church without missional people." I understand but where does that leave us?

I don't remember exactly how he said it but he commented on seeker sensitive churches and pointed out that scripture says that God is the seeker. So I guess in that sense we should all be seeker sensitive in our worship.

All in all it was a great time together. I learned a lot but it will take awhile to process it all. Next one is in September but I'll be meeting with my cohort several times in between. And of course, it will take months to get Steve and Dan straightened out on all this stuff. :) Okay, so they're thinking the same.